


Proving the Sun

by RecessiveJean



Category: White Collar
Genre: Casefic elements, Con Artists, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-22 20:40:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9624476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RecessiveJean/pseuds/RecessiveJean
Summary: They are the best parts of each other's lives, and they will do whatever it takes to keep it that way.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [veleda_k](https://archiveofourown.org/users/veleda_k/gifts).



Neal would never say it out loud because it sounds corny enough in his head, but Kate’s entrance into his life struck him like the sunrise. He hadn’t even known he was standing in the dark until she arrived, but now that she’s here, the brightest point of his whole existence, he doesn’t want to imagine a life without her. He has himself half-convinced he’ll never need to, but even sunny days suffer their share of shadows, so maybe it’s less the fear of spouting cliché that keeps him from saying it aloud than just plain _fear_. He can’t afford to imagine a day when the shadows overtake the sun.

He catches himself staring at her without meaning to. When she leans forward over a floorplan, tracking Mozzie’s narration as he highlights access points like he’s a high school drafting teacher and she’s studying for the final exam, Neal knows he should be looking at the blueprint too but instead he’s staring at the curve of her neck, the line of her collarbone, and the sweep of her hair as she tilts her head to examine a new angle.

Mozzie’s palm making contact with the back of Neal’s head interrupts his staring, but not for long. Never for long.

She plans with her hands, tracing lines and shapes in the air that he struggles to follow, because she thinks in shapes and it’s foreign to him, this kind of linear approach to the con. Her posture is exquisite and her expression deliberate, but her hands take on a life of their own as she outlines their primary access route into the building, and he wants to see things like she does.

“I thought we had tickets,” Neal frowns, and Mozzie harrumphs as only Mozzie can.

“So we know he’s heard at least ten words out of a hundred! Yes, we _had_ tickets, but the seal is wrong. They changed it last week. Apparently the last one was too easy to forge.”

“Well,” Kate is nothing if not fair, “it really was.”

That night when Neal follows her through a museum side door, and she looks over her shoulder to smile at him with all the delight of a child who’s just swiped a finger full of frosting from her own birthday cake, because this is _fun_ for her, his chest is split with a sharp stab of joy.

His life is daylight. All daylight, all the time.

They dance across the floor at a party neither of them was invited to. Her dress swishes around his legs, two thousand dollars’ worth of couture got for a song at a secondhand shop, and she wears it like it’s new. His attention is almost entirely on her as he waltzes her past the painting they’ve come to see.

“The brushstrokes,” she whispers in his ear, like a poem to a lover, “you can do those no problem.”

Her confidence buoys him, bubbles in his throat like clean champagne. He focuses on their target.

“But the pigment . . .” He’s not worried, exactly, but he’s aware of the challenge it poses. She shakes her head, unfazed.

“I can handle that. You’ll tell me if it’s close.”

She’s right, of course. He has the eye for tone, but she’s got the hand for mixing it.

“We’ll tell Moz to source the canvas.” He spins her, cavalier, overconfident. She twirls beneath his palm, a dream he forgot to wake up from.

“This is going to be fun.”

 ~*~

It is, and it also really isn’t. It’s the kind of fun that is supposed to finance their next few months, but instead earns them an enemy who gives them more than one sleepless night after an escape too close for comfort. Even a week after they make their getaway, alive and little more than that, the imagining of everything that could have been plagues him through the dark. The shadows press too close, and he’s all at once too keenly aware of the vulnerability of sunlight.

When Neal wakes yet again in the middle of the night, sweat-slicked, breathless, remembering the nearness of their escape, he fights to avoid disturbing Kate. Eases himself out from under the sheets and tries to move silently into the open air of the living room. But she stirs, rises, follows him and settles onto the couch at his side.

“You can’t blame yourself, Neal.” Her hands thread through his hair. He refuses to meet her gaze because he can’t bear the absolution he knows he’ll find. “The intel was bad. That’s all.”

“I rushed us,” he mutters, staring at his hands. “I was in a hurry. Too damn sure of myself. If I’d taken another week to get it right—”

“It wouldn’t have mattered. They’d still have caught it, because of their guy.”

“ _Mozzie’s_ guy,” Neal growls. Kate shakes her head; she’s not having it.

“Moz is still beating himself up over that. You know how he is with his sources. He really thought this guy was solid.”

“Yeah, well . . . look where it got us.” Neal won’t look in her eyes, but he can’t look away from the thin, horizontal scratch across her neck. “Got you.”

“It’s fine,” Kate waves away the memory of the knife at her throat as nothing more substantial than the nightmare that woke him.

Like he wasn’t the cause of it.

“Kate,” he catches her hand in both of his, “it’s not _fine_. You could have—”

“But I didn’t.” It’s not absolution he sees now. She’s offering something more; deeper and more precious than mere forgiveness. This is her trust in him, new and naked in the silver of moonlight streaming through the window. Her confidence is horrific in its very purity. “I didn’t, and we’re both still here. Right now. Isn’t that enough?” She twists her fingers so she’s the one holding his hands, now. “Can’t it be enough?”

How can she even ask?

“You’re more than enough, Kate. You’re—”

Everything.

He doesn’t say it, but maybe he doesn’t have to. She’s smiling at him like she already knows. Like maybe she knew, somehow, since the moment Adler introduced him to her and set them on this course together. This path he wouldn’t trade for anything, now that he’s on it with her.

There are a thousand reasons this shouldn’t work. He knows that. He’s seen people get in too deep with somebody they never should have trusted in the first place, but he’s not them. She’s not a dream. She’s the thing he wakes up to, not the one he wakes up from.

He surrenders, in the end. To her, to sleep, and to the promise of her presence in his bed and his life at the end of every nightmare, waking or otherwise.

After he carries her back to bed, reveling in the sound of her laughter at the utter absurdity of being carried, like priceless treasure, across the short span of floor; after he tastes her, relearns her, tangles his fingers in her hair and swallows the unbearable sweetness of her gasps, soft and almost lost in the heavy darkness of the room, there is no hiding from any of it.

His every muscle unknots, the awful pressure eases off the back of his neck for one more night, and he stretches out beside her like he’s home at last.

“Kate,” he says, and she’s still there, her fingers laced through his. He can almost hear her smiling in the dark.

“Get some sleep, Neal. I’m not going anywhere.”

He believes her, and obeys.

 ~*~

Kate does not sleep. Her fingers fluff Neal’s hair, then smooth it down.

Kate does not think in cliché. Her thoughts are patterns, neat and well-ordered, and though she would recognize the truth of what Neal said if he described their life as sunlight fighting back shadow, it’s not the phrase she herself would choose.

Life with Neal changed the pattern of hers. Days that had been linear, driving forward with the sole purpose of survival, are now layered with extra purpose and new pleasure.

Kate had always seen pleasure as something other people experienced. Her decision to stay in New York for Neal—well, Nick—had been one of the few times she’d made a decision for her own selfish desire. It had frightened her at the time, her willingness to throw away the solidity of a life she and Michael had planned out for the sake of an ephemeral _maybe_ , and she’d promised herself she would never do it again.

But it turned out Kate wasn’t so good with promises, and now, Neal asleep by her side, she acknowledges that a life previously driven by her need to survive is now, simply, not.

The inevitable result of finally getting everything you need.

The sky beyond their window lightens, slightly, with the advent of the coming day. Kate tips her chin up in anticipation of the sunrise.

Neal, beside her, settles deeper into sleep.

Kate smiles.

This is enough.


End file.
